Mexican mayor's severed head placed atop pick-up truck 6 days after taking office

The mayor of a violence-plagued city in Mexico was killed on Sunday with his decapitated body left in a pickup truck and his severed head placed atop the vehicle’s roof. 

Alejandro Arcos, 43, was killed just six days after he took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people in southwestern Mexico. 

The city, the capital of Guerrero state, is so violent that a drug gang openly staged a demonstration, hijacked a government armored car and took police hostage in 2023 to win the release of arrested suspects. 

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Images of what appeared to be Arcos’ severed head atop a white pick-up truck have been circulating on social media. In other images, his headless body partially covered with a blanket can be seen in the passenger side of the truck.

Arcos’ social media posts leading up to his death showed him supervising disaster relief efforts following the impact of Hurricane John last month, which caused severe flooding in beach resort Acapulco and surrounding towns.

Mourners, including Arcos’ wife, attended a funeral for the slain official on Monday.

“His loss mourns the entire Guerrero society and fills us with indignation,” Guerrero Governor Evelyn Salgado said in a statement shared on social media.

Alejandro Moreno, the national leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, lamented Arcos’ killing and said it came just three days after the new city government’s secretary, Francisco Tapia, was shot to death. 

“They had been in office less than a week,” Moreno wrote on his social media accounts. “They were young and honest public servants who were seeking progress for their community.”

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Moreno called on the federal attorney general’s office to lead the investigation into Arcos and Tapia’s murders, given “the situation of ungovernability in Guerrero.”

Guerrero has become one of the deadliest states for aspiring and elected public officials, as well as for journalists. At least six candidates for public office were killed in the state in the run-up to Mexico’s June 2 elections.

Bloody turf battles have raged between two drug gangs, the Ardillos and the Tlacos. The battle has resulted in dozens of gruesome killings and some high-profile scandals.

A previous mayor was caught on video apparently holding a meeting with leaders of one of the gangs at a restaurant. She was subsequently expelled from her party.

In July 2023, federal officials said a demonstration held by hundreds of people in Chilpancingo that month had been organized by the Ardillos gang to win the release of two gang leaders arrested for drugs and weapons possession.

The demonstrators largely blocked all traffic on the highway between Mexico City and Acapulco for two days, battled security forces and commandeered a police armored truck and used it to ram down the gates of the state legislature building.

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The demonstrators abducted 10 members of the state police and National Guard, as well as three state and federal officials, and held them hostage to enforce their demands before releasing them.

Last week, the Mexican army seized the weapons of local police in the cartel-dominated city of Culiacan in the country’s northwest Sinaloa state, as violence and gunfights have ravaged that city in recent weeks also. The Mexican army has been known to seize weapons from distrusted police forces it suspects of either being involved in aiding the cartel, or over concerns the units were carrying unregistered arms that made abuses harder to trace. 

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.